Heartbeat messages and other forms of connection keep-alive mechanism can be used, sent and/or implied from messages or indicators sent between entities, clients, and/or servers in a network to infer or determine the operational state of one or more endpoints of the heartbeat messages. In general, when these messages arrive and/or are received on-time, one entity can assume that the other is functional (i.e., healthy, operational, operating within certain known or predictable parameters, etc.). However, when attempting to conserve the use of a radio channel in mobile networks (e.g., to increase mobile device battery life, reduce congestion or signaling, etc.), heartbeat messages, when used, may have negative impacts on system performance and bandwidth utilization. Specifically, when used by multiple applications without applying any intelligence, the radio channel may be activated too frequently, significantly affecting performance of the networks in particular, since state of the art cellular networks are not designed for connections that require frequent, low-throughput and/or small amounts of data, including keep-alive or heart beat messages.
Each transaction puts the mobile device radio in a high-power mode for a considerable length of time—typically between 15-30 seconds. As the high-power mode can consume as much as 100× the power as an idle mode, these network-initiated applications quickly drain battery. Even if the keep-alive messages are sent using alternative channels such as SMS, it could also result in too many expensive (to either the operator or the user) messages that become system overhead. The problem with constant polling and signaling is that mobile phones also rely on signaling to send and receive calls and SMS messages and sometimes these basic mobile phone functions are forced to take a backseat to unruly applications and other mobile clients.